Best posts made by nate

I’ve been working with Gurujeet for the last couple months getting things rolling for NGC’s tech side. I thought I’d put a list of what I’m currently working on here so that people can see what’s coming down the pike, ask questions, and potentially join what will hopefully become the NGC tech team.

Logo

For a few months, I had working on the NGC logo on my list, but designing logos is hard and I didn’t make any progress on it till we were really down to the wire at the end of June.

I used the image of a clamshell stone I’d worked on a while ago when working on potential logos for GoKibitz, and a vertical slab approach that I kinda ganked from This American Life’s logo.

It still needed some work, though, as I wasn’t happy with the typeface I’d chosen or the way the word “Go” looked. Before Go Congress, I finished up a second version:

This version uses two different typefaces: Exo, for “National” and “Center”, which has simple geometric forms with a lot of personality shown in letters like the C, L, and E, then Cassanet Regular for the word “Go”, where I wanted something that made both those letters look as much like circles as possible, because, well, it makes them look like stones. I think the contrast between “Go” and the other words is much improved, and Exo is a great typeface to use for regular copy.

I envision the possibility of swapping out different versions of the go stone as variations.

Anyway: that’s the current state of our official design resources. I think it’s a good start, but I would certainly welcome anyone with more design experience who wanted to shepherd the process of developing a more complete brand package.

The NGC Website

I raced a basic placeholder site out the door for the press release that announced the grant from the INAF (pronounced eye-naf) and have been working on the website since then.

To access it, you’ll need to put in a username and password: ngc / go nats

Why have a username and password, if I’m putting it here? It’s just to keep it veiled from search engines and other casual viewers: if you’re interested enough in the NGC to be reading this, you’re interested enough to have access to the dev site.

UPDATE: Yuan Zhou’s lessons are now held at the National Go Center and made available for online attendees as well as those who can attend in person. Please see the NGC’s Events Calendar for more details.

I just wanted to post about the monthly go lessons local go teacher Yuan Zhou conducts. I’ve been attending almost every month for years, and I’ve gone from 13k to 1k at the most recent Go Congress. He uses Skype + KGS to hold his lessons, and he combines a detailed review of a pro game with paired games + reviews for all attendees after lunch.

If you’d be interested in joining, just email him, and if you have any questions, feel free to post them here or send them my way.

DETAILS:

Yuan Zhou’s Monthly Go lesson. The lesson will run from 10am to 5pm US EDT.
The fee is $100.

I want your awesome go photographs for use on the National Go Center site. I’ve got a nascent collection of general photography on Flickr for use in banner images and other aspects of site design, but I’d like more variety. Obviously when we have a physical location, we’ll start to get a lot of photographs taken there, which will be great, but I’d love any photographs you have that you’d be willing to let us use that involve either go equipment or (better) people playing go at local events or places.